Legalistic information society
I just spent two days struggling with a server hardware problem. At times, the Internet society is so fragile.
Digital systems are fundamental architectural components of the information society. Therefore it is silly that we need such a strong legalistic approach. Folks on the debian-legal mailing list have spent hours and hours making interpretations on different software licenses. The interpretations are very precise and good but I hope there wasn’t such need. But we’re forced to have such conversations.
Assistant professor Lucie Guibault said that programmers should more carefully mark their copyrights in GPL programs. Otherwise the court might be confused on who is the copyright holder: the FSF, who wrote the license, or somebody else?
The article received strong criticism such as
This “lawyer” is a blithering idiot. The GPL FAQ (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-howto.html) explicitly tells you to put your own copyright notice on any GPL’d source.
Maybe the commentor is right, but how many programmers really add their copyright notices? And how many of us who modify a GPL’d program follow this requirement (2 a):
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
If Linux kernel contributors actually followed this rule, each of the 15 000 files in the kernel source would have a long changelog at the beginning of the file.
With other infrastructure, we don’t need to negotiate on whether I’m allowed to walk on a public road or what I may use may the electricity for. Free software is a wonderful thing but the forced legalism is a curse.
P.S. A nice paper on trivial software patents.
Copyright as a Penalty System
Rusty Russell has this brilliant piece on how copyright is a penalty system, not a reward system:
The first poorly understood point is that copyright on my work does not give me the right to copy it. It prevents everyone else from copying: a so-called “negative right”. As an example, if you own the last copy of my autobiography, I don’t have the right to make a copy: it’s your property. You don’t either: it’s my copyright. If you destroy that last copy, my copyright still exists, but is useless. This illuminates something noone ever spelt out for me: that copyright is a weakening of property law. Normally when you buy something, you get all the rights the previous owner had: if you buy apples off me and sell apple juice in competition with me, I have no legal recourse. Copyright weakens property law by not transferring the “right to copy” with sale: that sliver of rights is removed from every copy and remains in the hands of the copyright holder.
Even if copyright disappears, property rights don’t:
The traditional focus on copyright, without considering the property which is its source, skews the copyright debate quite badly. Works which are no longer copyrighted are often said to “fall into the public domain”. This is a terrible phrase, which implies that property rights are being destroyed. We don’t say that apples, which were never copyrighted, are “in the public domain”. Or consider UK singer Cliff Richard’s accusation that, as copyright expires, “every three months from the beginning of 2008, I will lose a song”, as if the songs will no longer exist.
